Next Steps¶

Starting ejabberd¶

Depending on how you installed ejabberd, it may be started automatically by the operating system at system boot time.

You can use the ejabberdctl command line administration script to start and stop ejabberd, check its status and many other administrative tasks.

If you provided the configure option --enable-user=USER (see compilation options, you can execute ejabberdctl with either that system account or root.

Usage example:

prompt> ejabberdctl start

prompt> ejabberdctl status
The node ejabberd@localhost is started with status: started
ejabberd is running in that node

prompt> ejabberdctl stop

If ejabberd doesn't start correctly and a crash dump file is generated, there was a severe problem. You can try to start ejabberd in interactive mode with the command bin/ejabberdctl live to see the error messages provided by Erlang and identify the exact the problem.

The ejabberdctl administration script is included in the bin directory in the Linux Installers and Docker image.

Please refer to the section ejabberdctl for details about ejabberdctl, and configurable options to fine tune the Erlang runtime system.

Autostart on Linux¶

If you compiled ejabberd from source code or some other method that doesn't setup autostarting ejabberd, you can try this method.

On a *nix system, create a system user called 'ejabberd', give it write access to the directories database/ and logs/, and set that as home.

If you want ejabberd to be started as daemon at boot time with that user, copy ejabberd.init from the bin directory to something like /etc/init.d/ejabberd. Then you can call /etc/inid.d/ejabberd start to start the server.

Or if you have a systemd distribution:

copy ejabberd.service to /etc/systemd/system/
run systemctl daemon-reload
run systemctl enable ejabberd.service
To start the server, you can run systemctl start ejabberd

When ejabberd is started, the processes that are started in the system are beam or beam.smp, and also epmd. For more information regarding epmd consult the section relating to epmd.

Administration Account¶

Some ejabberd installation methods ask you details for the first account, and take care to register that account and grant it administrative rights; in that case you can skip this section.

After installing ejabberd from source code or other methods, you may want to register the first XMPP account and grant it administrative rights:

Register an XMPP account on your ejabberd server. For example, if example.org is configured in the hosts section in your ejabberd configuration file, then you may want to register an account with JID admin1@example.org.

There are two ways to register an XMPP account in ejabberd:
- Using an XMPP client and In-Band Registration.
- Using ejabberdctl:
```
ejabberdctl register admin1 example.org password
```
Edit the ejabberd configuration file to give administration rights to the XMPP account you registered:
```
acl:
  admin:
    user: admin1@example.org

access_rules:
  configure:
    allow: admin
```
You can grant administrative privileges to many XMPP accounts, and also to accounts in other XMPP servers.
Restart ejabberd to load the new configuration, or run the reload_config command.
Open the Web Admin page in your favourite browser. The exact address depends on your ejabberd configuration, and may be http://localhost:5280/admin/, https://localhost:5443/admin/, https://localhost:5280/admin/ ...
Your web browser shows a login window. Introduce the full JID, in this example admin1@example.org, and the account password. If the web address hostname is the same that the account JID, you can provide simply the username instead of the full JID: admin1. See Web Admin for details.

Configuring ejabberd¶

Now that you got ejabberd installed and running, it's time to configure it to your needs. You can follow on the Configuration section and take also a look at the Tutorials.